Digital communication systems, and particularly, digital cellular and personal communication system (TCS) systems, include vocoding. Vocoding is the operation of digitally coding speech for transmission. For example, in digital cellular applications both the mobile, i.e., the cellular telephone, and the cellular infrastructure, i.e., the ground based equipment providing service to the mobile, each include a vocoder. In a typical cellular system, the vocoding permits substantial compression of the speech information to be transmitted and is particularly useful for increasing capacity of the cellular system.
In a mobile-to-mobile call, there is double stage speech encoding/decoding (or "tandem vocoding") unless some scheme is provided to bypass vocoder operation in the cellular infrastructure. This is explained as follows. In the mobile-to-mobile call, the mobile transmitting on the uplink uses its vocoder to encode the uplink speech. The cellular infrastructure automatically decodes the uplink speech, which is necessary if the speech is to be transmitted to a land line telephone (i.e., to the public switched telephone network), to an analog portion of the cellular communication system, or to a similar non-digital portion of the communication system. However, where the speech is to be transmitted to a mobile having digital capability, the speech must be re-encoded for digital transmission to the mobile. Tandem vocoding results in a significant reduction in perceived voice quality as compared to single stage vocoding (i.e., mobile-to-land line or land line-to-mobile calls). The voice quality degradation may be overcome if the decoding/encoding step is avoided in the cellular infrastructure. In a bypass mode of operation, the cellular infrastructure receives the compressed speech from the transmitting mobile and transmits it directly, without decoding/encoding, to the receiving mobile. The receiving mobile then decodes the speech as normal. But, without some indication that the vocoder operation should be bypassed in the cellular infrastructure, tandem vocoding takes place. Because of the significant effect that tandem vocoding has on voice quality, cellular system operators insist on having a bypass mode of operation.
In code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, the current standard IS-634 (MSC BSS A+Interface) has provisions for out-of-band control of vocoder bypass. The standard defines messages that the mobile switching center (MSC) can send to the base station controller (BSC) to enable or disable vocoder bypass. However, out-of-band control of vocoder bypass operation has numerous disadvantages including substantial delay in establishing bypass operation and increased traffic on the control channels.
In-band vocoder bypass signaling has been proposed to overcome the numerous disadvantages of out-of-band signaling, but the proposed in-band techniques offer little advantage over the out-of-band techniques. For example, the standard proposed by ETSI for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) "Tandem Free Operation" (i.e., vocoder bypass), is an in-band control approach to vocoder bypass operation. The standard specifies a set of in-band signaling messages to be sent between two BSC's for control of vocoder bypass. A single in-band channel for vocoder bypass signaling is allocated in the 64 kbps PCM compressed speech time slot. Specifically, the two least significant bits (LSBs) are allocated, i.e., stolen, for this channel. The bottom LSB, bit 0, is stolen at 8000/16=500 bps continuously. Another proposal calls for stealing at 8 kilobits/second (kbps) bursts. After establishing a bypass circuit, speech frames are sent in bit 1 and bit 0. The signaling information is not sent during bypass operation. This requires that the initial "TREQ" message requesting bypass operation must be explicitly acknowledged by a "TACK" signaling message before coded speech may be sent, i.e., bypass operation undertaken. The result is a complicated multi-state protocol with many timers and counters to track message sequencing. Furthermore, "special case" logic is required throughout to handle the fact that one BSC may advance to the next state before the other BSC. For example, in the BSC associated with sending the TREQ message is a timer to limit the number of times the TREQ message is sent, a timer to time out waiting to receive the TACK message, and logic to handle receiving the next state's message, TACK, prior to receiving the TREQ. The number and complexity of states in the proposed protocol cause transition times to be proportionally lengthy. The complexity also leads to difficulty monitoring and trouble-shooting subsystem operation.
As mentioned, the proposed protocols have substantial transition times from tandem vocoding to vocoder bypass mode of operation. For example, using a 500 bps continuous signaling control channel, transition time at a minimum may be as long as 240 milliseconds (ms). If negotiation of vocoder type is required, the transition time is even longer. Using an 8 kbps burst signaling control channel, a worst case transition time may be on the order of 1.5 seconds or more. And again, vocoder negotiation, if necessary, is not included in this estimated transition time.
Thus, there is a need for an improved method and apparatus for in-band signaling control of vocoder bypass.